The Country That Shared Its Diamonds

On 30 September 1966, a new flag was raised in a new capital city that was still being built.

The flag was light blue, the colour of the rain the land always longed for, crossed by a black stripe edged in white. The capital was Gaborone. Until then, the country's British rulers had run it from the town of Mafeking, which was not even inside its borders.

The country was Botswana. On that day it became independent, and it was one of the poorest countries on Earth.

A poor and dry land

Much of Botswana is covered by the Kalahari, a vast, dry stretch of sand and scrub. Most families lived by keeping cattle, and a bad drought could wipe out years of work. Many men left to work in the mines of South Africa, because there was so little work at home.

At independence, the country had only a few kilometres of tarred road. There were very few secondary schools, and very few people had been able to go to university. There was almost no industry at all.

Its first president was Seretse Khama.

The chief who married for love

Seretse Khama had been born in 1921 into the royal family of the Bangwato, one of the largest peoples of the country. He was expected to become their chief. While studying law in England, he met and married an Englishwoman, Ruth Williams, in 1948.

The marriage caused a storm. Neighbouring South Africa had just begun its system of apartheid, which kept people of different races apart, and its government objected strongly to a mixed marriage next door. Under that pressure, the British government sent Seretse into exile from his own homeland. He and Ruth were not allowed to return to live there until 1956, after he gave up his claim to be chief.

Instead of seeking revenge, he turned to building. He helped form a political party, won the country's first elections, and led it to independence.

Treasure under the sand

In 1967, only months after independence, geologists found diamonds at a place called Orapa. More large finds followed, including one at Jwaneng, which later became one of the richest diamond mines in the world.

Orapa lay in the lands of Seretse's own people, the Bangwato. Under the old customs, the riches beneath each region might have belonged to that region alone. Instead, the rights to minerals were placed in the hands of the nation as a whole. Seretse supported this. The wealth would be shared by every part of Botswana, not only the part where it happened to be found.

The government did not have the skills to run a diamond mine by itself, so it went into partnership with the mining company De Beers. Over the years it bargained hard, and in time it came to own half of the mining company, Debswana, and to receive a large share of the profits.

Turning diamonds into schools

In many countries, sudden wealth from the ground has led to waste, corruption and conflict. Botswana's leaders tried to avoid this. They made careful plans for spending, and they tried to keep the money flowing to the things that would last.

The diamond money paid for roads, so that villages were no longer cut off. It paid for schools, and children who would once have herded cattle all day learned to read. It paid for clinics and clean water. A university was built. Over the following decades, Botswana's economy grew faster than almost any other in the world, and the country moved from the poorest group of nations into the middle.

In 1976 Botswana launched its own money. It was named the pula, which means "rain" in Setswana, the word people also use as a blessing.

An unfinished story

Seretse Khama died in 1980, still in office. His vice-president, Ketumile Masire, continued the same careful path. Botswana has held regular elections ever since independence.

The story is not perfect. Many people in Botswana are still poor, and the gap between rich and poor is large. In the 1990s and 2000s the country was hit very hard by HIV and AIDS. And because so much depends on diamonds, which will one day run out, Botswana has had to work to build other kinds of work and income.

But for a country that began with so little, the choice made in those early years still stands out: that the treasure beneath the sand belonged to everyone.

Want to read more?

Seretse Khama, 1921–80, by Thomas Tlou, Neil Parsons and Willie Henderson, is a full and careful biography. Susan Williams's Colour Bar tells the story of Seretse and Ruth's marriage and exile, and how they came home to build a nation.